Article

Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers by
Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson. (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1987.427 pages. $24.95.)

By
Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, pp. 29-31

In 1946 the Interracial Committee for North Carolina (CNC) of the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare considered support for a bill
pending in the state legislature for the construction of a new
hospital. To the obvious annoyance of many of the white members
present, Junius Scales inquired how black patients were to be
accommodated, and how many black physicians and nurses would be
employed. Dr. Frank Graham, president of the University of North
Carolina and a founding member of the CNC, responded that the hospital
would be segregated and that no black nurses or physicians would be
employed. While recognizing that this was a "shameful" situation,
Dr. Graham suggested that it was unavoidable if the hospital were to
be built at all. Sales recalled that before he could reply, Dr. David
Jones, president of Bennett College, took the lectern: "'I and my
people would follow Dr. Graham to the ends of the earth,' he said. 'We
respect and love him. But my God!' His voice became an agonized
roar...'My God! How long must my people wait until the first faltering
word is spoken by white men of good will saying that segregation is
criminal--that it is destroying my people.' His impressive figure
trembling with emotion, he appeared to want to say something else, but
instead he resumed to his seat amid a stunned silence and sat with his
hand over his face."

Junius Scales came of age during the era of the depression and New
Deal, in a South where segregation was still firmly intact. As the
hospital incident demonstrated, the majority of white liberals
"still clung to separate but equal delusions; were eager to avoid
confrontation on the 'race issue'; shied away from a chance to fight
segregation even on favorable grounds; and were all too often ready to
seek a 'solution' by promising a future fight which usually did not
take place." Scales was sensitive to the pervasive bigotry against
blacks prevalent even in the enlightened community of Chapel
Hill. "By established custom," he recalled, "20 percent of
the population was consigned to poverty, indignation and isolation
because of skin color." They were a concern only as a reservoir
for domestic servants. This gulf between the daily reality of racism
and discrimination, and the white liberal response helped stimulate
Scales's interest and subsequent membership in the Communist Party,
the only political organization that actively challenged the
segregation system and made racial equality a central component of its
agenda.

Junius Scales appeared an unlikely Communist. He was born to one of
the most prominent families in North Carolina. John Rolfe and
Pocahontas were among his maternal ancestors. Scales's paternal
ancestors arrived in Jamestown, Va., in 1623, and after migrating to
North Carolina took an active role in politics, serving in the state
legislature, U.S. Congress, North Carolina Supreme Court, and the
office of governor. Alfred Moore Scales, Junius's father, was elected
to the state senate at the age of twenty five, twice re-elected over
long intervals, and declined an appointment as chief justice of the
North Carolina Supreme Court. In addition to a successful law
practice, his real estate investments were worth several million
dollars by the time Junius was born in 1920. The family suffered
severe financial losses at the end of the 1920s, but Alfred Scales
took the monetary loss in stride. He had always impressed upon his
children the futility of dedicating one's life to the accumulation of
material wealth, and demonstrated the importance of public service
through his political activities on behalf of liberal racial policies,
women's suffrage, and religious tolerance.

While Scales shared his father's abiding concern for the greater
good, the traditional outlets for such a pursuit appeared less than
satisfactory. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries entering the
1938 freshman class at Chapel Hill, Scales had little interest in
social status and refused to pledge for a fraternity. His primary
interests were music, literature and ideas. Scales became increasingly
sensitive to the widening gap between himself and traditional Southern
values, finding that most of the intellectual yeast for undergraduates
was provided by "outsiders" from the North and West. (It was at Chapel
Hill that he met Richard Nickson, a native of New Mexico, who became a
life-long friend and assisted in the writing of this memoir.)

Abernathy's bookstore, a noted gathering place for intellectuals
and radicals which Scales had frequented since high school days,
continued to provide a stimulating center for intellectual and
political discourse. The critical point in his political development,
however, came with his participation in a student-labor conference in
Durham, sponsored by the state CIO and a number of black and white
academic figures from throughout the state. For the first time in his
life, Scales met blacks on an equal basis, and shared a meal with
several black students, one of whom was the daughter of Dr. David
Jones. Shortly thereafter he joined the American Student Union, and
was soon invited to join the Communist Party. After careful
consideration, he decided to join the Party on a "trial" basis in the
spring of 1939.

Scales quickly became disillusioned with the sectarianism and lack
of purpose of the Chapel Hill chapter of the Communist Party. He was
preparing to resign when he met Bart Logan, native Georgian and
district organizer for North and South Carolina. Scales assisted Logan
with a textile strike in High Point, an event that reaffimmed his
commitment to the Communist Party as the means for advancing economic
and racial justice. He was overwhelmed by the poverty and exploitation
that dominated life in the

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textile mill. At the same time, Scales was
stirred by the deep commitment of Logan and several veterans from the
famous Gastonia strike to help the powerless move beyond fear and
apathy by organizing. Scales concluded that more than a strike was
taking place; it was a social revolution. For the next eighteen years,
Junius Scales would strive to carry this effort forward as a leading
member of the Communist Party in North Carolina.

Junius Scales provides an important and often moving account of the
Communist Party's role in labor organizing and civil rights activities
in the South during the 1940s. While Scales applies a critical eye to
the events of the past, his memoir succeeds in capturing the hope and
enthusiastic dedication that motivated him and many of his compatriots
some forty years ago. As a key organizer of the Communist Party in the
High Point area and Chapel Hill, and later district organizer for the
state, Scales sought political answers to local problems, and often
succeeded in adapting national Party directives to individual
cases. He spent his first year as a Party member working in a textile
mill, engaging workers directly, and responding as an organizer to the
harsh reality of their lives. After serving in the army during the
war. Scales moved back to Chapel Hill. Scales began graduate study in
History, and took a leading role in several liberal groups that
thrived in the early postwar period, including the American Veterans
Committee and the Committee for North Carolina. He avoided
sectarianism, and appreciated the efforts of white liberals who
perhaps were not moving as quickly as he. As a Communist Scales saw
himself as a gadfly-his role was not to subvert liberal groups, but to
push them as far as their program and membership would allow. Scales
believed that if socialism were to be realized in the United States,
it must come through the force of ideas and the ballot box, not by
violence and rhetorical coercion.

Scales's account of the Party's positive contributions is
accompanied by a harsh critique of the dogmatism and moral limitations
of Party policy, which often guided his own behavior. Recounting his
part in the expulsion of two Party members, he writes, "was always,
the glorious ends justified the slimy means and I had to squelch that
persistent inner voice which suggested that perhaps the unsavory means
were tainting the qualities of the socialist goals." However,
during the 1940s, Scales repressed any doubts he had concerning the
Party and concentrated his attention on local issues and concerns. In
the early 1940s the Party organized broad labor support in High Point
to petition the Federal Housing Authority to provide low cost
housing. This effort ultimately succeeded, despite strong opposition
from local "slum lords," and greatly improved the standard of low-cost
housing in the area. Voter registration and education were also an
important part of Party efforts, in addition to running workers for
local office on third party tickets. The Southern Negro Youth Congress
provided an organized based for young militant black students, who
took an active role in voter registration efforts in the black
community. Scales's moving account of a 1946 SNYC meeting in Columbia,
S.C., attended by several thousand, provides a glimpse of the black
awakening already underway throughout the South. At that meeting
Scales was elected a vice president of the SNYC, the first and only
white to serve as an officer of the organization. There was also the
successful organization of the tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, a
predominantly black union with a powerful leadership that became an
active force in local politics. One final example is Scales's and

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Louis Austin's timely intervention in the Mack Ingram case, helping to
avert the "legal lynching" of a black man convicted of assaulting a
white woman with his "glare," having never gotten within seventy feet
of her. Scales and Austin, black editor of the Carolina
Times, investigated the story, and fed it to New York
Post reporter Ted Poston. The national and international
attention that followed led to the appeal of the conviction, and its
reversal.

The changing political climate of the late 1940s limited Scales's
ability to maneuver within the parameters of Communist Party policy,
as well as in the society at large. In 1947, he publicly declared his
membership in the Communist Party in an effort to counteract
anti-communist hysteria. His announcement had the opposite effect, and
left him isolated from many of his liberal associates. Meanwhile, the
national Communist Party was increasingly on the defensive in the face
of federal efforts to outlaw the Party, and the CIO's expulsion of
left-wing unions. Scales explains how the Party leadership turned
inward, becoming more sectarian and internally divisive, and less an
active force for political change. The early 1950s were painful years
for Scales and others whose efforts to remain a creative force on the
political scene became increasingly futile. For Scales, it came to an
abrupt end on November 18, 1954, when he was arrested by FBI officials
and charged with violating the Smith Act.

As Scales undertook a long and lonely legal battle, his
disillusionment with the Communist Party and its increasing
irrelevance to the American political scene culminated with his
departure from the Party. Living outside of the Party, he writes, was
"an extremely painful adjustment .... The belief was dead and with
it had gone the innocence and joy forever. The truth as we saw it was
that the American Communist dream had become a cruel, convoluted
hoax." In spite of his "non-Communist" status, the government
relentlessly pursued Scales's case, which it built primarily on the
testimony of paid informers. The government sought to prove that by
virtue of his membership in the Communist Party, Scales was guilty of
conspiracy to violently overthrow the government. Despite the
brilliant legal counsel of Telford Taylor, Scales was convicted by a
jury in Greensboro. The legal history of the case and its relationship
to the interpretation of the Smith Act and the Internal Security Act,
is an important study in Cold War domestic politics. Ultimately, the
Supreme Court upheld Scales's conviction, 5-4, and he entered the
federal penitentiary on October 2,1961, to begin serving a six-year
sentence.

Scales's reflection on his prison experience comprises the last
part of this memoir and is an integral part of it, for this book is
less a history of the Communist Party in North Carolina than the story
of one individual's unending quest on behalf of human decency and
justice. Scales's personal dignity and integrity sustained him in
prison. He spent much of his time trying to make the experience more
endurable for those around him. For example, he shared his love and
appreciation of music with fellow inmates by organizing popular Sunday
evening presentations of his favorite operas. Scales's separation from
his devoted wife, Gladys, and young daughter, Barbara, was the most
painful aspect of his imprisonment. Prominent liberals organized a
movement for an executive pardon. However, J. Edgar Hoover and
Nicholas Katzenbach wanted Scales first to prove the fact that he was
no longer a loyal Communist by testifying about other Party
members. With the full realization that a pardon might not be gained
unless he "cooperated," Scales refused to consider the
suggestion. Nevertheless, on Christmas Day 1962, Scales was reunited
with his family following an executive commutation of his sentence
(thus he remains a convicted felon).

Junius Scales's participation in the racial and social reform
movements of the 1940s may seem little more than a footnote to that
history. While he was being tried and serving time, the civil rights
movement came to the fore of the national scene with the Brown
decision, the emergence of Martin Luther King, the mass protests of
the early sixties, and ultimately the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is ironic that while the Justice
Department focused its determined energy on the conviction and
incarceration of Junius Scales as a threat to the government, white
Southerners blatantly ignored federal law by obstructing the
integration of schools, with little interference from federal law
enforcement agencies. And, despite the gains of the 1950s and 1960s,
many of the promises of the civil rights movement remain unrealized in
the areas of jobs, housing, education, and economic
security. Moreover, organized labor has been unable to effectively
represent the economic and political interests of the majority of
American workers. Junius Scales's "God" may have failed. But the
struggle for economic and racial justice which challenged his youthful
idealism remains a powerful reality, yet to penetrate the mainstream
of American political discourse.